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This version of the Enterprise was mainly built for combat operations, and did not have the scientific instruments nor amenities found on the ship's counterpart from the primary universe. In a briefing, Worf compared the ISS Enterprise-D to early Klingon vessels that focused on weaponry rather than research. The armaments of this version of the Enterprise included weapons capable of widespread destruction with a heavy reliance on nuclear weaponry, possibly due to the quantity of fuel needed for the elephantine engines making it more problematic to rely on anti-matter based weapons like photon torpedoes on a routine basis. The ship did possess holodecks, but in the mirror Starfleet, they were often used to assess the loyalty of members of the crew—Security ChiefDeanna Troi had designed a number of such simulations. Personal communicators, such as those used in the regular universe, were not employed, though given that they would have made officers too easy to track down and kill, it is suspected that high ranking government personnel had squelched this technology in the interest of self-preservation. All communications were handled by speaking directly to the computer. The agonizers seen in the 23rd century mirror universe had shrunk substantially, their loss in mass and volume roughly equivalent to that seen between the 23rd century Federation communicator and the 24th century Federation combadge. While infiltrating the vessel, Geordi La Forge observed that the output of the ISS Enterprise's warp core could "boil a small ocean." (TNGnovel: Dark Mirror)

Dark Mirror was published prior to the Star Trek: Deep Space Nine episode "Crossover", which established a very different version of the 24th century mirror universe, a continuation of the canon version first seen in TOSepisode: "Mirror, Mirror". As such, data points from the continuity of Dark Mirror have so far been ignored in subsequent fiction.